THE MUSE
A movie review

by Jesse Gale

NEW YORK, 23 September 1999 - Albert Brooks’ The Muse looks at formula filmmaking: can a hack writer cobble together a film when he’s got nothing to say? Can he build a script from make-up and filler shots, or does a script need magic to make it go?

The story: a played-out screenwriter (Brooks) decides to fork over excruciating amounts of cash to placate the whims of a real-life muse, Sarah Little (Sharon Stone).

The muse winds up staying in his house, and wreaking havoc upon his family life. But she does manage to inspire him to write a super summer comedy. The super-super idea? A Jim Carrey film! Set in an aquarium! Ho ho!

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the film’s creators cannot even imagine, hypothetically, an inspired premise for a film script. The film’s own tired jokes are just barely strung together with filler shots: Stone’s breasts jiggling listlessly; a waxed BMW idling from one meeting to another; Brooks’ novocained mug slack with its accustomed disbelief. But those shots cannot fill in the emptiness of this film.

Previously, Brooks made challenging movies about people trying to learn. Defending Your Life was no warm-summer-comedy, no action-adventure-buddy pic. In it, Brooks dreamed of more than Carrey antics underwater - he imagined a newly personal way of understanding experience. But The Muse just follows the same watered-down formula as the Aquarium Hilarity script at its core. In both, a nebbish funnyman is saddled with a business he cannot operate, antics ensue, and the business works out in some unexpected way. One bankable star, one "novel" location, seventy-four dead jokes.

Unlike Brooks' other pictures, The Muse is a sure-fire-hit warm-summer-feel-good that any hack writer could have strained out, even if he were forced to sleep in the back shed while writing it. The Muse, like Aquarium Hilarity, is the product of mediocre Hollywood-hitmaking-Hell - some lesser inferno, dark with five-minute-pitch, where nostrils sting with brimming Stone.

No surprise, then, that the cast of the film - including Brooks, Stone, Jeff Bridges as "the best friend," and Andie MacDowell as "the wife" - also phone in their charms. The score (Elton John) is strictly elevator.

The jokes? Silent theater in NYC, and two elderly women walked out. The biggest laugh? When one of the elderly women came back to retrieve her purse. (Of course, it's she who should laugh - she got away.)

Albert Brooks’ make-up artist must be tired at night. It’s tough enough to conceal stars' baggy eye-circles -- but even Max Factor couldn't conceal this formula's fatigue. And The Muse, for all its contented insider-ishness, cannot be disguised as anything but an exhausted offering, weary in shape and execution.